I was born into AM radio. The first time I heard Elvis sing “Hound Dog” was on the radio in 1956, driving in our new turquoise Chevy BelAir. Cars all had radios, and they were all AM radios. That’s all there was. The hits they played on the radio were available for home play on 45s. Then in the mid-60s or so, FM radio came along, with the mandated need to play something other than what the AM stations were playing. Album-oriented rock was born, the kind of music available for home play on 33s. Cars started coming with FM radios, too, but in the late 60s, which is ground zero for a lot of what has become known as classic rock, it was still usually AM on the car radio and FM on the home radio.
This meant there was a dichotomy in the listening of the average baby boomer. Maybe as often as not you listened to AM and FM in equal measure when it came to the radio, depending on where you were listening. There were certainly still plenty of good singles, but you probably spent your money on albums. Car radios had buttons with preset stations, and you would bounce around from station to station to find a good song amongst: 1) the ads, and 2) the tripe. I have always wondered who, in 1967, made the single of Frank and Nancy’s “Something Stupid” a number one seller. I mean, who bought that single 45 rpm recording? No one I knew. (I’ve read somewhere that it was Frank’s biggest hit. Oy!) Anyhow, a million years later, the boomers have two separate tracks in their brain. One is the AM music they listened to, and the other is the AOR music they listened to. There is occasional overlap—e.g., the Stones and the Beatles—but mostly they’re separate, and they sound different. I don’t think of “Strangers in the Night” as a Sinatra song, as loosely connected to my collection of his great 50s albums. I think of it as an AM radio song that I couldn’t press the button fast enough to hear something—anything—else. Listening to the Turtles recently started me thinking about this: they were an AM band in spades. That doesn’t mean I don’t love some of their songs, not because of nostalgia but because I think they’re really good songs. It just means that I would hear them only on the AM radio. I never once bought one of their albums. I don’t know anyone who did.
It’s hard explaining the AM/AOR dichotomy to people born after the boomers. If you came to music consciousness in the disco era, if one of your primary music sources was MTV, or if you were plugged into rap culture… None of that seems to play across the same canvas. Perhaps “Build Me Up Buttercup” encapsulates the problem perfectly. I have a younger friend who thinks it’s a great song. More to the point, he thinks that I think it’s a great song. Its “greatness” may be arguable—feh!—but its position as an AM and not an AOR song is unquestionable. And, I guess, one man’s cornball is another man’s greatest hit. (I do rather like Baby Now That I’ve Found You” by the way, so I'm not totally anti-Foundations. What can I say?)
I do have an oldies playlist. If I had to define it, I would say it’s songs I originally heard primarily on the radio. AM radio. Way back when. It explains itself through listening better than I can explain it on paper.
No comments:
Post a Comment